Free Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth Page B

‘The Burial of Sophocles’, before embarkation. He rushed home to West Bromwich to say goodbye to his widowed mother and dined at Codford for the last time with Gilson, who wrote: ‘It is impossible for us to tell him all the hopes and wishes and prayers that the first TCBSite to set forth carries with him…I feel that this is a memorable day in TCBSian history.’
    The day had already come for some of those who had belonged to the TCBS before the Council of London. Sidney Barrowclough had sailed with the Royal Field Artillery in September for Salonica, the staging-post for British troops fighting in the Balkans. T. K. Barnsley, who had switched his ambitions from the Methodist ministry to professional soldiering, was now in the trenches with the élite Coldstream Guards, having transferred from the Warwickshires in August. Smith, waiting to go as the first of the ‘foursquare’ TCBS, wrote to Tolkien:
We are now so pledged to see the matter through, that no reasoning or thinking about it will do anything except waste time and undermine resolution. I often thought that we should be put to the fiery trial: the time is almost upon us. If we emerge, we emerge victorious, if not, I hope I shall be proud to die for my country and the TCBS. But who knows what is hidden in the black darkness between now and the spring? It is the most anxious hour of my life.
    On 21 November 1915, in rain and biting wind, Lieutenant G. B. Smith paraded at the head of his platoon on the Wiltshire downs and then took the train to Southampton. After a night crossing to Le Havre, shadowed by a British destroyer, Smith and the Salford Pals marched off the blacked-out troop ship Princess Caroline onto beleaguered French soil.
    On 2 December, following a week of route marches, GBS wrote from the front to say that he had visited the trenches ‘to the peril of neither body or soul’. He was cheerful, if somewhatoverworked. Far more distressing to him than the trenches was the fact that somewhere on the journey he had lost his great poem, ‘The Burial of Sophocles’. Military censorship prevented him from pinpointing his position, but in fact he was in Albert, near the River Somme, an area that would become darkly familiar to Tolkien and notorious in history.
    Ever since joining the army in July, Tolkien had turned his attention away from Kôr and the Otherworld over the sea and had focused on Kortirion and mortal lands, where the elves are a fading, elusive ‘shadow-people’. But Tolkien’s wartime poem ‘ Habbanan beneath the Stars ’ was peopled by the figures of men and was set neither in England nor in Aryador. He later recalled that it was written either at Brocton Camp in December 1915, or the following June in the massive transit camp at Étaples on the French coast. Either way, it seems apt that the poem should depict an encampment of men.
There is a sound of faint guitars
    And distant echoes of a song,
    For there men gather into rings
    Round their red fires while one voice sings -
    And all about is night.
    The Qenya lexicon describes Habbanan simply as ‘a region on the borders of Valinor’, and prior to the post-war ‘Lost Tales’ there is no further elucidation of its significance.
    But there is a spiritual and religious dimension to Tolkien’s world, never absent though rarely blatant, that was notably pronounced in his original conceptions. Side by side with terms for different Elvish tribes in the lexicon are words for ‘saint’, ‘monastery’, and ‘crucifixion’, ‘nun’, ‘gospel’, and ‘Christian missionary’. There is even a Qenya aphorism, perilmë metto aimaktur perperienta , ‘We indeed endure things but the martyrs endured and to the end’ – an interesting perspective from a member of the Great War generation. The Valar who ruleValinor, or ‘Asgard’, are only gods in pagan